At first they came for the smokers but I did not speak out as I did not smoke. Then they came for the binge drinkers but I said nothing as I did not binge. Now they have an obesity strategy.

Friday, November 09, 2007

Fat Lib

The glorious day is at hand. We now have our place in the academy - Fat Studies.

Fat studies is an important and emerging interdisciplinary area of study incorporating scholarship from the humanities and social sciences. Contributors to the discipline confront and critique cultural constraints against notions of fatness and the fat body. As with women’s studies, queer studies and disability studies, there is a political imperative to the work within fat studies, with an aim to create social change around issues of weight oppression, through promoting size acceptance and body diversity.

Freedom fellow fatties! I can see the promised land - with oodles of milk and honey.

8 comments:

Two of the cleverest characters in English literature are fat - Falstaff and Count Fosco in The Woman in White. Both are intellectuals, both have great powers of eloquence, both are charming and amusing, both fat.

On these fat studies - do blokes do women studies? heteros queer studies? whites black studies? Or do they self select i.e. blokes, heteros, whites feel uncomfortable and outnumbered attending lectures on those subjects and so do not take up the subjects. So will the stick insects feel comfortable in such surroundings? They can always hide (very easily) behind the other students I suppose.

mikeovswinton on the Northern Circular, but never south of the river
said...

I am aware that when an academic institution that I have some knowledge of ran a course on "Women and Politics" there were in fact several male students who undertook it. BTW, sort of picking up kb player's Eng Lit point; that Oscar Wilde wasn't exactly on the slim side, was he, and he had many of the characteristics noted by kb. I'm starting to write like I'm a London taxi driver , so I'll leave. I had that Peter Ryley in the back of my cab once, and you wouldn't believe.............

This being one of the two times a year when I am put on the scales at the diabetic clinic I'm off for a six mile walk tomorrow in the vain hope that it will remove all the damage done by the 'roll on sausage' [Scots for a roll, two actually, containing a slice of fat-laden Lorne or square sausage] with which I've started each Saturday since the last time I stepped on them. 'Banish plump Jack and banish all the world!'

I have renounced my fatness. I have seen the light. I am going for thinness. No more biscuits, no more cakes. Salad will be my friend from now on. Forward the thinists. (Or, Thinisnistas! if you prefer) But I still won't go to the meetings!

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About Me

This is the work avoidance strategy and ego trip of Peter Ryley, who has just retired, despite being far too young, from working in lifelong learning, latterly at the University of Hull, and from teaching part-time at Manchester Metropolitan University. I live partly in Manchester and the rest of the time in Pelion, Greece. I continue to research and write on the history of Anarchism, and have frequent rants about the importance and current parlous state of adult education.